Ask HN: How do I get out of my unhappy coding job?

He asked for advice and I wrote what worked for me. Seriously dude, why all the hate? It's up to him to choose based on the suggestions from different people.

Yes, I factored in everything. I didn't get unemployment because I quit. I also didn't know anybody in the Bay Area. I knew those before I made a decision.

I hated my job. I became a very bitter person. I didn't like what I became. I had to act big to change things. I can tell you that despite the financial difficulties, I was very happy when I didn't have a job. I was developing a number of side projects.

I never lost hope that I'll get what I want. I knew from previous experiences that if I work hard, good things will come.

I'm not saying that he should just quit his job. If he does, he should make a commitment to do things that would make him desirable for the type of company he wants to work in.

There are no guarantees with anything. He can stay at his current company but it could also go under or he could get laid off. Wouldn't it be nice to take a career path that is guaranteed to make you financially stable for the rest of your life?

Short answer: Build something that you would have built if you had your dream job. Show it to people who hire for your job.

Long answer: Its much easier to get an interview for a job if you can demonstrate that you've done it well before. It might still not be easy (because they may have degree requirements that you dont have ) but it will be easier than if you had nothing.

So go do what you really really want to do. Create a side project and do it. DO IT WELL. Ie, get feedback, make it as professional as possible. The project should have the same criteria for sucess as if it had been built by someone who's job you are seeking.

Then show it to the people who hire for that kind of position.

Pitfalls: 1. The kind of job that your passionate about may not pay very well in the future. 2. You might realise its not your passion and because of that you'd have done only an half assed job. This can be solved by trying something else. You'll know soon enough if this makes you happy or not.

Life is too short to have jobs that you dont like. I've been in that situation and have recently remedied it. I should have done this sooner.

Having said what I did in a brother post to yours, on the other hand I'd say that the amount of practically useful stuff in a CS degree is surprisingly small, and I learned most of it before I went to college. I'd probably rate analysis of algorithms as the most useful, but it is very simple stuff: it's just expressing the time or space used by an algorithm as a formula, a function of the input size, but discarding all but the fastest-growing term.

There's all the other stuff that you need to know, like the basic data structures, but these are (IME) hard to avoid if you've done much programming at all. I'm not sure you need to know hardly anything about hardware architecture unless you're aiming to code at a very low level, device drivers etc. Obviously, familiarity with machine code, cache characteristics, optimization at the assembly level, etc. are useful, but these things are best learned by sitting at a computer with a stack the Intel processor PDFs, an assembly timing loop and a simple algorithm you're trying to reduce the clock count on.

I'll add some of my own experience, as I got into compilers and currently work as a compiler developer. I was interested in compilers at a young age, I recall thinking hard in school about how one should go about evaluating arithmetic expressions correctly accounting for precedence. I wrote an open-source expression evaluator for the Delphi community, as part of the JEDI library. I built a regular expression compiler in Java, compiling to Java bytecode, as my final year project in college. Then, in my first job (in a software company, working on a green-field project, very lucky), I was able to point out the benefit of writing a custom compiler for a DSL to fill in a configurability-shaped hole in the architecture. After having built up this experience, I was in good shape when Borland (as it was at the time) came calling looking for an engineer for the Delphi compiler.

I don't think there's a deterministic kind of guarantee that can be drawn from this experience. But learning the whole stack of technology that you need to implement a language certainly gives you plenty of practice in a lot of the fundamentals of CS, right from data structures and parsing at the top (I personally would avoid parser generators as a didactic exercise) to machine architecture and cache hierarchies at the bottom, to details you'd rather not have to know about, like the idiosyncratic addressing modes of the x86 processor. And putting it into practice, even if it's in an open-source side-project, gives you a better angle on related opportunities.

There are still a number of interesting companies in London depending on what you're interested in...

Web development: check out NMA Top 50 for Agencies.

Startups: Check out the WiredUK Silicon Roundabout article _and_ the comments!

Misc: Check out things like Times TechTrack.

Interested in a particular technology? Check out the official language job board and search for London (e.g jobs.perl.org).

There are definitely interesting companies you just have to spend some time finding them because they won't come to you.

I'd like to pick up on that "detachment from users" concept. In my (limited) experience, it seems that the more interesting the technology is you're working on, the further you're typically removed from the users.

For instance, in a typical java consulting job, you're face to face with users all the time - but you're building a boring webapp. On the other extreme you could be building awesome technical tools but your real users are several time-to-market phases away.